Of love, life and the internet

Here are the notes I wrote for my speech for the Tech Mahindra/ Mahindra Satyam i5 talks

It’s a pleasure to be here today nearly three years after I left TechM.

I joined Mahindra British Telecom in May 2005 after completing my MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad as part of the first GLC batch. I joined the Sharda centre office on Karve road. For those of familiar with that office, there was a restaurant called Swami just across the road and my flat was in the apartment complex just behind Swami. And…my seat used to be in the section adjacent to the reception. So, my claim to fame in that office was that it used to take me less than 2 minutes from my bed to my desk. That was a good life.

At that point, the company was about 4000 people and I had the privilege of working closely with the top management and experience entrepreneurship first hand. In 4 years the company underwent a name change, went public and grew from 4000 people to 25000 people. Of course, it has recently also built this wonderful campus which I’m visiting for the first time. I feel proud that I too made a tiny contribution towards this fantastic company.

I was given the opportunity to join the account management team in London managing the Portal related business with BT. It was called the collaboration platform. That was the beginning of my love affair with anything to do with the web. I left Tech Mahindra to start a company focused on web technology. The company is called Gaboli and it offers web solutions for education and corporate customers.

I must start on topic by saying that the contents of my talk today are crowdsourced from facebook. I put up a status update on the topic and get about 10 ideas from people in my circle. Today I wish to talk about the evolution of social networks and what the future of social networks will look like.

Let’s start by looking at the history of the net. I will then later speak about what I find interesting about social networks and finally I would like to leave you with one idea as food for thought.

- People say the earliest form of the internet can be traced back to MIT in 1962 with new research on packet switching as opposed to circuit switching. By the late 60s they had designed the specifications for ARPANET with speeds of around 2.4 kbps

- By the 1970s, the community was imagining connected federated networks and started developing protocols such as TCP and later Domain Name System or DNS as we know it.

- By the early 90s, Tim Berners Lee was leading MIT’s effort towards creating the World Wide Web and hence is known as the father of the world wide web.

- Gradually with Hypertext protocols and HTML, it was possible for GUI Browsers to be launched and Netscape was one of the earliest browsers.

Now. Around 2003-04 is when the term web 2.0 came into fashion. What was web 2.0 and how was it different from web 1.0. Simply put, the web was mostly a store of information till then.

But web 2.0 brought about a new level of interaction and transaction online. Consumers turned into Producers of content. e.g. Wikipedia, Youtube. Open APIs and XML helped websites talk to each other like never before. e.g. Pizza hut could easily mark all the pizza outlets on a google map. File sharing became easier through P2P networks and media streaming took advantage of the faster speeds. VOIP became mainstream. Online payments became more common fueling ecommerce.

Since around the same time, social networks have seen explosive adoption around the world. Now let me ask you guys some questions now:

- How many of you ever signed up on Orkut?

- How many of you still use Orkut?

How many examples of products that you can think of where in one country you get 15 million users in about 1 year and then lose most of them the next year!

- How many of you have a facebook account?

To give you some idea of statistics

- It generates nearly 1000 billion pageviews per month

- Half of facebook users login everyday… thats means at any point of time there is probably 300 million people on facebook.

- I have heard (don’t quote me on this) that according to statistics, men spend most of their time looking through photos of women they don’t know. Maybe these are friends of friends. Men will be men! Can you guess what women do? Women spend most of their time looking through photos of other women they do know!

- What about facebook apps. Zynga is now on the top gaming companies in the world based on their popular games, farmville, mafia wars, etc. Do you know there are more farmville players than the total number of twitter users.

Do you know how Google makes money? The search is free, email is free, browsers free, maps are free… so how does it make money? You might have noticed sponsored links on the right column while using google. Each of these advertisers pay Google a small amount of money anytime a user clicks on their ad. In other words, there is a cost per click. This could be as low as Rs. 2 or as high as Rs. 100 per click. With about $30 billion dollars, you can imagine the number of advertisers and the number of clicks!

Facebook followed a similar model and now many people say that facebook may overtake Google in advertising revenue one day. That brings us to Google+.

Google+. About a year ago, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmit resigned. Larry Page took over as CEO and the first step he took was to link the whole company’s bonus to the performance in social.

How many of you signed up for Google+? Very interestingly, you had to sign up for Google+ .. you didn’t get it normally as you got google buzz in your gmail inbox.. why?

As part of signing up for Google+, they asked two three questions - they asked are you Mr./ Ms./ Mrs., they asked your date of birth and they asked your city. This was possibly the most important step of all… why?

When you’re an advertiser, you want to reach your specific audience. For e.g. Maruti target audience for alto is men between 25 and 35 in urban cities in India. Facebook had this information for each of its members as you gave that information when you signed up. However, Google never had access to the personal demographic information for its search users. That is why, advertisers started feeling that they were getting a better return on the advertising through facebook compared to Google. That is why Google+ is critical to their strategy.

Finally, on the evolution of social networks – it is now the age of verticalised networks or contextual networks. You might have noticed, your facebook a/c has connected you to your college friends, family and colleagues at work. Every time your college friend uploads an embarrassing picture, you think what would my colleagues think? Or, when you friend sends a dirty joke on your wall – you think what will my family think?

There is a need for separate networks for different aspects of your lives and that is one of the main philosophies behind my company, Gaboli. Those of us in web development know the importance of online forums and communities when it comes to resolving issues related to open source.

In Gaboli, for a customer, we created MyLaw.net which is India’s largest network for lawyers and legal professionals. It also includes an online university so lawyers can take online courses and give online exams. We have created a closed network for the employees of a Fortune 500 company. We run online networks for some of India’s leading business schools such as XLRI and Jamnalal Bajaj. Increasingly, companies and organisations wanting to engage with their stakeholders online are going in for building community features or at the very least, trying to connect via facebook and twitter.

“there is random and then there is vineet jawa” - Tarun Varma on Nov 22 from the top berth of a twelve hour delayed Sampark Kranti somewhere in the hinterland of Bihar. On that note, here goes my eclectic collection of updates, musings and gyaan from ‘around the country’ and ‘around the web’

Around the country

Decent trains
I’m typing this post as we return from the XLRI annual alumni homecoming. it’s been 1 year for Gaboli’s OneSchool at xl and the alumni tracking has gone from 1600 to about 5300 people in the last 12 months. the goal is to get it to 8000 as soon as possible and then focus more on alumni targeted services. sales pitch aside, the Jamshedpur campus has a way of getting me back into the blogging mode. the hospitality and personal touch of the students, faculty and staff on campus is truly heart warming. anyway, Naxalite driven 8 hour delay aside, this 2 tier AC  compartment has a working plug point.  thanks to my photon, I’m online and getting a decent workday on my laptop. check out the new age ‘toilet occuppied status gizmo’ in the train. you gotta love the graphic.

Startup Circuit

after sometime away from the startup circuit, I got a chance to go to a Startup Saturday and the IMT Gaziabad fair (thanks to NH24, the journey time from south delhi has reduced by a good 45 mins. Tarun’s joke timing is impeccable. question: what was the elephant doing on the M1 (ref. UK). answer: about 10 miles an hour…har. har.). Both events gave a far better experience than barcamp. but I do have to say one common theme amongst all these events is that the vast majority of partners from the startup community (investors, associations etc) who put their logo on the banners and the website don’t even bother to show up. what kind of startup focused outfits miss out on the startup fairs and events? makes me wonder about the community. read on further for my sentiments on No Shows…

ss - couple of cool things happened. for the first time an individual stood up and announced he’s interested in pitching 15 lakhs into education focused startup. in general, the feeling I get is the investors’ mood has really swung and the markets hot again. what do you do when stocks, gold and real estate are all near their respective all time highs.

imt - a nice charming session by mahesh murthy. you can catch a nice segment of his talk below (i’m trying the ad free streaming from photo bucket). was also good to see our friend gaurav misra in action and get to hear about the startup struggle stories from ixigo & idiscoveri. the biggest reflection point was when one guy walked up and said, why are ‘you guys’ still at a startup fair - you’re not a startup anymore.

Gaboli in Bangalore

We’re expanding the technical staff for our development centre in Bangalore. References work really well for us so if you have a brother, sister.. neighbour who you think is an awesome web developer - do refer them across to us.

Around the Web

Me, Myself and I - Egosurfing

how many times have you googled your own name? how often do you do so? it’s almost like asking how often do you look in the mirror. the first page of google results is your relfection to the world. anytime I hear about someone of interest (personally or professionally) I tend to google them or search for them on linkedin almost immediately. they used to say first impressions are made within the first 3 seconds of the meeting.. well now it’s probably more like the first 3 seconds of googling your name. I’m lucky enough to have a unique surname but then most people will get searched along with the name of their employer.

that brings me to a beautiful new service - about.me. it’s from the the wordpress guys (automattic) and I really think just about every net savvy person should go and sign up. if you’re name is Amit Agarwal, you’re probably not going to be able to get amitagarwal.com or any close variant. you might as well ride on the search optimised capabilities of platforms like about.me

MyLaw.net

Rainmaker launched MyLaw.net (Developed by Gaboli) and is already signing up thousands of people from the legal community. It’s a great platform with excellent content and will continuously provide targeted services for the community (jobs, online courses etc)

I was also added to academia.edu - a network for academicians. I was impressed with the simplicity of user experience design. it manages to achieve great functionality without confusing.

New prediction/ Opportunity spotted

we hired a girl who did a ‘No Show’. Pooja (name not changed) was in touch with us till 5 days before the start date discussing relocation and logistics and then she just disappeared - that’s a No Show. yup… it’s a word which wasn’t even in our dictionaries but now we hear that 30% of new hires in the IT industry just ‘don’t show up’ on their first day of work. they won’t take your calls, they’ll change their phone number and then one week later you’ll see where they eventually joined through their linkedin profile.

I’m all for a name and shame approach here. or even a consortium where information about ‘no shows’ are shared amongst the industry players. maybe give people like Pooja a thing or two to think about before they just disappear. if only she had called and said she had a better offer, would’ve saved us plenty of time and money.

End Note:

I lost and found my phone twice on this trip. the first time I was woken up at 3 a.m. by a lady who found the phone on the train floor next to my berth and so she woke me up and handed it to me. sweet (though slightly freaky). the second time it fell out of my pocket in the autorikshaw at 4 in the morning. 4:20 or so I realised it’s missing and we called the number. the auto driver answered - he was still next to the station.

someone’s looking out for me good ol nokia.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation…. where do I even begin to talk about this one….

The internet is data and search.. nothing more nothing less (I think I first heard this from Abhijeet Kelkar back in TechM days)… so once you’ve out your data out there .. how can you influence search.

Think about it – when was the last time you clicked on the ad on the right side of the google results page. Or when was the last time you searched beyond the 2^nd or 3^rd results page? That’s right… if you’re not in the organic results of the first page of Google – you’re in trouble.

Google educates users on how to maximise their ‘searchability’ – but they also advocate against certain black hat practices. There are two main phases in SEO – a) On page optimisation and b) Off page optimisation.

On page optimisation generally involves code (HTML headers, meta tags, code:content ratio etc) as well as content optimisation (keyword density, fresh content etc)

Off page optimisation relies on link building (to improve popularity of the site in the eyes of the search crawler. This is done through directory submission and more authentically through manual directory submission.

So once you’ve done the brainwork around keyword analysis (through google trends, traffic estimator, adwords keyword suggestion tool) you have to move onto the grunt phase of many hours of link building and content distribution.

It’s been a while – but I thought of starting out some brief reviews of products and sites. Hope this will help amateurs and professionals in their web development efforts.

I just came across this service for web design templates. With just about everyone moving to come basic CMS, templates and themes become very important. Joomla, Drupla, Dot Net Nuke and Wordpress are common examples of CMS platforms that are template driven. The real magic of a CMS is the choice of templates out there for web page design templates through the thousands of freelance developers and designers in open source.

There are tools out there that help you splice images and pdf files into templates (aka template builders) but generally they don’t help with respect to browser compatability or W3C standards. That really defeats the purpose of SEO. Also, keep in mind templates need to built to support all kinds of plugins and upgrades. Sometimes it’s best left to a professional.

Many templates are available for free or for nominal amounts. Sometimes there are options for ‘right out buy’ in which case the designer promises to take the template off the market after you have paid that premium.

In my experience, web development has so much subjective elements that it’s best to give the customer or end user the choice in the final design. In that case, the more options the better.

It’s been a while since I blogged - which is good news I guess, as my blogging activity level is inversely proportionate to the activity levels at Gaboli.

Looking back at the last 60 days there’ve been many experiments…

Rechargeitnow.com

Sitting in a campus in Jamshedpur away from the city, I suddenly needed to re-charge/ top-up the pre-pay balance on my phone. I was hesitant to do it on just any random site but I did use rechargeitnow.com and it worked very smooth. Got Rs. 444 on my airtel in 2-3 minutes..

Competition

My emarketing classes ended with a competition between two groups of about 20 people each. The basic brief was that each section had to create a website that was (a) free and (b) would support analytics. In 3 weeks time the groups had to maximise the number of unique visitors on their site.

With the usual ‘free’ tools at hand - word of mouth, email marketing, seo, social media… both teams had around 1400-1500 unique visitors by the end of the competition. As expected SEO had no effect in such a short timeframe. It was mainly email, social media and word of mouth which led to these visitors. This was expected for any ‘web startup’ with initial traffic from friends and family.

One new tool that I discovered through one team was an email address generating tool. You type in a keyword and the tool crawls the web to find email addresses linked to that topic. I don’t know how relevant or effective it was - but it explained how spamming was so easy these days.

More interesting to note was the dynamics amongst the groups. In the final semester, very few people were motivated to put in too much effort as most people were also looking for jobs. Team leaders had very little influence on the teams and communication often broke down. As with most projects in life, it’s more about the people involved than the task at hand.

This leads to the more complex issue - on the web, how do you jump to that next level and get into that ‘growth’ stage.  It’s also an interesting challenge which I’ve been discussiing with Anshul who’s been running youthkiawaaz.com. A journalist driven blogging site with well written content focused on youth in India.

Hiring Interns in a startup

We’re experimenting with interns this summer. Mostly, summer interns for marketing, delivery management etc. One fell sick with jaundice and the others are yet to join… many people advise that it’s probably not worth the effort. Keen to see what our experience will be by August.

Technology

Using a CMS plugin to solve IE6 compatability issues - bad decision. Browser compatability continues to torment most of the web development world. In a country like India, you can’t ignore IE6 and recently safari has started becoming significant enough to warrant attention. The other consistent complaint across all online marketing projects is the ever widening gap between ‘clicks’ and ‘visits’. Analytics reveal only 50% of the paid traffic from adwords and facebook actually turn into ‘visits’. The reasons provided for this are not really sufficient in my mind. They say visits are not recorded for people that have javascript disabled. If that were the case then on average most CMS features would not load for 50% of the people - and that’s not consistent with the recorded bounce rate.

Affiliate networks have long complained that India is not suited for the ‘click’ model anyway… One way around this is to get into a ‘cost per lead’ model - but then the quality of the leads become truly doubtful.
Sanitiser update: Godrej did a free sample sachet sample for Protekt - their hand sanitiser brand. Rs. 2 for the sachet. The radio is full of ads for this product as well. Although I still see the gap in the institutional market, very few companies, buildings have the dispensers so far but at the same time the swine-flu effect is dying.

Way back in June last year I had profiled this little known start up in my blog - aardvark.

I’m not saying I told you so…. but looks who’s gone and bought them for $50 mn.

Now - there’s a Indian equivalent that I profiled as well, Voicetap. I’m not saying anything here…. but I’m sure those guys are tap dancing away at the moment.

What’s been buzzing in the world of social networks?

- Google Buzz: Well my class unanimously agreed that Google Buzz is late in the game but Google had no choice. Read Jeremiah’s take on this strategy and the impact on the stakeholder spectrum (facebook, twitter, SEO etc.). Personally, I agree with both but I’m intrigued about how this fits in with the story for Google Wave.

Social Gaming
- A quick mention of ibibo. One of the largest desi social networks. Recently they’ve launched a marketing blitz on ‘Why play akele? Play social games at ibibo’. Reminds me of a childhood PJ. What did the lonely banana say to the other banana. “I am a-kela“. But hats off to ibibo for the first strong positioning statement from an Indian social network. Desi Martini, Big Adda, Fropper, iTimes… they’ve all tried bollywood masala and failed to make a dent into facebook and orkut market share

- We all know Zynga (of Farmville and Mafia Wars fame). Well they’ve opened an office in Bangalore and that made front page news in all major dailies.(that’s a bit much!). However our very own Rodinhood has lots to say about the space. (Side note: Rodinhood is by Alok Kejriwal of of c2w and g2w fame. I met him way back in 1999 when I was still in college. He treated us to a nice breakfast and was beaming proud of running one of the few dot coms to survive the crash. I guess he realised the B2B mantra way before the rest of the online junta)

Love is in the air
For some reason I added ‘Love’ in the title of this blog. With V day last week, I guess I have to give it due share of importance. Check out this winner ad from Google. (and yes… I couldn’t resist the pink and red border)

Paying the Price of working in India
Paypal got suspended in India. That’s huge. Reserve Bank of India - would you have done that to an ‘offline’ player like ICICI?

Is your brand listening?
Real time feedback is the single largest lesson for brand positioning on the internet. I was pleasantly surprised with NEO Sports recently. Have a look at this twitter conversation and how quickly you can win back trust just by acknowledging the customer respectfully. (Read bottom to top)

@ameyamhatre thnkfully, they’ve acknowledged my protests. let see how they mend their ways.

Thats prompt,thanks!RT @NEO_Cricket: @nareshb all your points have been noted and ll be fwded to the concerned person. Thnks for ur feedback

an appeal to ur reason (& MBA bosses) @NEO_cricket : adding an extra second to two to ur ad slots don’t increase a brand’s mindshare

wud @MMXSurprise like it if I don’t buy their xcllent FB fone just cos @NEO_cricket ’s prgrmming (cutting short coverage for ads) sucks?

to brands advertising on @NEO_cricket : Watch where you r treading, you are causing resentment amongst your customers

a sincere msg to @NEO_cricket : not allowing a proper closure to an over by stretching ads is not world-class programming

Social Media Marketing - Welcome to India!

Hello Readers,

At Gaboli, we’re conducting a survey for all MBA alumni in India. This is in association with the ex Dean of Alumni Affairs, Delhi University.

It’ll take 5-7 minutes and I’ll be happy to share the results with anyone interested. So if you completed a MBA from India Click Here. The deadline is Feb 14th!

WYSIWYG is one of my favourite acronyms. In the last few days, we’ve been consulting a private equity company on implementing a Wiki based knowledge platform. On the top of my google apps account, I see a google ad for a rich text editor/ WYSIWYG based platform.

Anyway, if we’ve spoken recently, you’ll agree my entrepreneur journey is constantly full of inspection, introspection, retrospection etc. One change I see is that it’s more important to be decisive on all matters in life and hence, judging where people (read customers, suppliers, partners) stand on the various spectrums in life is a big part of the game. When you’re in a company, you take a person for face value because he/she has a designation - like or not, your relationship is governed to an extent.

As an entrepreneur I’ve come to value genuiness at a whole new level. I’d rather have a potential customer bang the phone down rather than have us work out a consultative 40 page proposal, only to hand it off to their favourite vendor to copy. (Yes, you know who you are!)

So I wonder what kind of people are living life WYSIWYG? Any theories? (Leave a comment below). My theory is that there is something about corporate culture and management education that kills the WYSIWYGness in people. I don’t say that people don’t have moral values but the corporate mask is definitely weird.

- I’m reminded of post MBA interviews when the prescribed body language and tone was ‘I’m amazingly qualified for this job but hey I don’t really need it.’
- Ever asked a MBA alumni on tips for interview and heard them say “Just be yourself”?
- Companies are now faced with this dilemma too. Brands spend billions on their propaganda (read positioning) but lo and behold the wonders of the web. The party’s almost over. Catch Inc’s story on you’ve been yelped! With Yelp, customer feedback is immediate and all pervasive. To paraphrase ex Forrestor Analyst, Jeremiah.. You can’t hide behind the pro-corporate hyperbole for long. Information asymmetry is on it’s way out…. Open yourself to living life - WYSIWYG.

Sabsebolo.com

Discovery of the week. Actually, it’s Feb 2, 2010. I can afford to say, discovery of the decade!

Scenario - it was 20 minutes to a client call. Client wanted it 3 way.. and once again I was shuddering at the thought of paying Rs. 450 to airtel for a conference bridge for 30 mins. So our good friend DB suggested sabsebolo. Signed up in seconds. Immediately you get your permanent telephone bridge, access code and local access numbers for all major metros.

The line was clear. No issues in joining the bridge. You get to hear a message from the sponsor for 5 seconds before the call starts. For this service, I would be willing to hear 5 sponsor messages! I still get nightmares about sales conference calls over the expensive doorsabha conference bridges. Web 2.0 and just works technology.. gotta love it.

Did I forget to mention - it’s free!

Shabaash Sabeer .. this one is seriously hot .. may you make 400 more!

Teaching

It happened sooner in life than I expected. I’ve started teaching. It’s only once a week but nonetheless - it’s probably 10 years earlier than I thought.

The course is on e-marketing and its in the final semester for MBA students. Two sections of 50 students each. Each lecture is about 2 hours long. There’s the prescribed course material which couldn’t possibly be more ‘offline’. So I generally add in snippets of gyaan from real life experience. New experience for me and here are some of the highlights:

- After the first day, wife’s first question “Was one section better than the other?”. I look at her in disbelief “How did you know?”.. Gets back into her Mac with a knowing nod “Always is.. Al-ways is the case”

- Delhi to Gurgaon drive takes half the time at 8:10 in the morning on a Saturday
- Indian students can spend 3-4 hours on the internet every day, but barely a few seconds outside email and orkut
- The next biggest thing on the net is job sites.
- Back benchers seem to make the most interesting contributions to discussions
- Students rattle off definitions of jargon alarmingly well. As soon as I ask for an example.. they’re stumped.

Oh well. I’ve started Bill Gates’ recommended book for teachers Work Hard, Be Nice. Wisely said, the problems of the education sector is rarely about the students and mostly about the capability of the teachers.

Courtesy Aditya ‘Dean’ Dikshit and Rajat Maaker, I’ve found the inspiration to overcome inertia and come back to my blog. Rajat says I need to write down my predictions so that one day I can say ‘I told you so’. But the tipping factor on this lazy, second saturday of the month, afternoon was the movie ‘The Crupier’. It’s about a writer who gets a job with a casino - takes part in a robbery scheme but still manages to place his bets well enough to pull it off.

So here’s my piece today on taking bets in life or more specifically - in business.

Latest Opportunity Obsession:
To make a short story long, during our visit to the US in September, I noticed the prevelance of hand sanitiser gel dispensers in almost every public facility - airports, hotels, public bathrooms, lounges, corporte offices etc. etc. Not to forget, the small travel size bottles in almost every lady’s purse. Then you think about the convenience factor and that once someone starts using it, it’s hard to stop. Think about the scare factor - Mothers concerned for their kids. Lifebuoy soap sales are up 30-40% since they linked their advertisements to prevention of H1N1. Swines…

Now in India, within the last 45 days I’ve seen 3 new big brands entering in the space and the radio in Pune and Bangalore (at least) are constantly playing ads. However, the market is huge and still in the nascent to growth stage. Plenty of bucks to be made. Hotels, Offices, Schools, Restaurants are still open fields. Heck - Let me go ahead and make my audacious bets.

- I predict the market will grow significantly for the next 5-7 years.
- The urban institutional sales will peak in about 18-24 months.
- Once that has happened, some ‘chik shampoo’ dude will come along and introduce sachet size packets for sanitiser gel and sell them for Rs. 1 (or thereabout) to consumers. Middle Class Mother’s will start putting a packet in lunch boxes for the kids. The rich kid’s schools will have dispensers anyway
- A new player will emerge through a quick gain in market share. This player will either be bought out or will diversify heavily within its first 3 years.
- In 2015, free packets will be distributed to the poor (ok ok…too much)

Quoting the line from Rocket Singh - ‘Risk to spiderman bhi leta hai… main to sirf salesman hoon.’ Ok - that didn’t really make sense (…In the movie or in real life)

My other prediction is the boom for Single Malt Whiskey in India: No Brainer!

To conclude the post, my biggest bet is now on context based social networks. Large - small, generic - branded, public - private… Every single trusted relationship or network will be moving some parts of their interactions and transactions online. With the diversity in consumer tastes, preferences, needs and desires there’s place for a quite a few people to help provide those platforms and tools.

People say ‘there can only be one Facebook, one Twitter, one Google Wave’. My only answer is that large corporations by definition are ‘feature focused’ to cater to mass markets. Small startups find opportunities in being ‘customer focused’. A few marquee customers, some references and you’re ready to roll.

3 years from now, I could be eating sour humble pie .. but then the bet’s worth it